Μια πολλά καλή ανάλυση η οποία εξηγά γιατί η ισραηλινή προπαγάνδα [τζαι οποιαδήποτε κρατική προπαγάνδα] παρά τις λογοκρισίες που επιβάλει, τζαι τις υστερίες που προσπαθεί να δημιουργήσει, εν μπορεί στην τεχνολογική εποχή που ζούμε να ελέγξει την διακίνηση της πληροφορίας ή/ζαι την τεκμηρίωσή της.....

    Μια πολλά καλή ανάλυση η οποία εξηγά γιατί η ισραηλινή προπαγάνδα [τζαι οποιαδήποτε κρατική προπαγάνδα] παρά τις λογοκρισίες που επιβάλει, τζαι τις υστερίες που προσπαθεί να δημιουργήσει, εν μπορεί στην τεχνολογική εποχή που ζούμε να ελέγξει την διακίνηση της πληροφορίας ή/ζαι την τεκμηρίωσή της.....

Steven Sinofsky

@stevesi

This thread below offers a view on why the media had so much difficulty with the news yesterday compared to the way online worked. It is an important perspective that I wanted to build upon.

It should not come as a surprise that the "competitor" to the media yesterday is also called "open source". OS News has all the properties of "open source" that we are familiar with from software. That means all the benefits.

It also means all of the negatives as viewed by incumbents. Much like proprietary software, the flagship media outlets view news gathering through the lens of proprietary source, only in this case the source generally means access to people, information, data that is not available to laypeople.

Since the post-Watergate era reporting has meant knocking on doors, cold calling, and most of all having relationships with established sources and experts on topics.

Conversely, these established sources and experts rely on these relationships to spoon out information and views in an effort to shape a narrative. This is a routine/process/game that has only become more institutionalized.

And those sources cold-called, much like people who did not have access to reusable code they were wildly mismatched with relative to the professionals. That is why so often these people inadvertently shaped a narrative that later proved to have problems.

In the past before open source, stories would run, information would be provided by "sources close to" whatever was happening in the world, and then that was the established narrative.

In today's world it is not just that everyone anywhere can post their thoughts, personal experiences, videos/photos, or anything that may or may not contribute. It is also that there is a community of people willing to test the veracity of that information. And then there is a community willing to compare the results of those tests and so on. It becomes essentially impossible for the news to be defined by a private conversation between a "well-placed source" and a reporter.

This reality extends even further to the vast array of sensors from satellite imagery to maps, witness recordings, historical information and records, and an incredible collection of data sources—many provided by the government itself. These sources provide more inputs to a wide-ranging community testing the validity of stories.

Finally add to this that often there are true experts on events that are no longer bound by organizations involved who are willing to lend their opinions.

It isn't simply the domain knowledge or access to the data, but the checks and balances, and the debate (vigorous as it is) across all those bits and pieces. And it is also the speed at which that system works. The participants are available around the clock, in every language, in every time zone. No newsroom has that no matter how big.

An example comparison is the world of securing and maintaining software systems. By now most in the industry know that security vulnerabilities are discovered and understood far more quickly outside the makers of those products than inside their own organizations. The information to identify, defend, and correct these problems—whether proprietary software or not—exceed that of the companies themselves. This promise of open-source software has held true from the early days. It is why the old school of keeping close to the vest in this space has so totally failed for vendors—this aspect of the proprietary model no longer works. It has been disruptive.

Events like yesterday clearly demonstrate just how disruptive the open-source news model is to events compared to the proprietary source model of the past. It also explains why there is a perception that news is far more opinion than it used to be—opinions can be branded and made proprietary far easier than trying to staff a team to compete with a community devoted to geoverification, for example.

Some long for the days of the 6pm newscast. This is most certainly a rose-colored view of the past. Those who recall this era remember being soothed by the packaging of the news. In hindsight, what we were watching was not a careful synthesis of fact-checked news but the opinions and interpretations of a small number of people with very limited expertise and even more limited information. It is only events like "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and others recently that have shown the limits of this process in the face of modern information, data, and analysis. I kept asking myself yesterday how different the WMD story would have been had it happened 20 years later. How would a generation of events have unfolded?

It is easy to cry "misinformation" but that is not what is going on. Misinformation is when actors deliberately falsify what is going on. Sharing something and having an opinion as just a random person isn't that. It is misinformation for institutions that trade on trust and truthfulness to put forth information that has not been vetted by a community or has not used all available sources. News gathering has come far enough now to know that the news is not simply what one actor said off the record confirmed by a person down the hall from that actor. The actors themselves have to deal with open-source information and make a case that stands up to the sources available to everyone.

Journalists then were exceedingly well-intentioned and did all they could at the time and acted with integrity as much as any profession. That is no different than what commercial software used to be—it was the right way and only way to make software at the time.

Disruption has many forms. We tend to focus on specific technologies and markets and the business impact. What we witnessed yesterday was a prime example of old-school versus modern reporting in a fluid, chaotic, and difficult situation. I believe it is incredibly important to take lessons from this and to adjust our view of what is reliable at the time.